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Archive for the tag “same”

Every now and again I come across a fantastic article the warrants posting here; I recently came across one in First Things which, I thought, was pretty insightful. Be edified.

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Of course, conservative Christians believe that women and men are not equal. We know we believe such things, because the elites outside our faith (today celebrating Women’s Equality Day) regularly tell us we do. How could we forget?

They are right, but in the wrong way. Civilized people realize (even when they don’t realize they realize) that male and female are not equal. G. K. Chesterton, with his table-turning wit, got it right in his essay “The Romance of Thrift”:

I remember an artistic and eager lady asking me in her grand green drawing-room whether I believed in the comradeship of the sexes, and why not. I was driven back on offering the obvious and sincere answer, “Because if I were to treat you for two minutes like a comrade, you would turn me out of the house.”

So it is. Women create, shape, and maintain human culture. Manners exist because women exist. Worthy men adjust their behavior when a woman enters the room. They become better creatures. Civilization arises and endures because women have expectations of themselves and of those around them.

This is not just a conservative or traditionalist idea.

The New York Times’s Gail Collins told NPR unequivocally that the most important primary finding of her brilliant book America’s Women (which faithfully sits to the left behind Leslie Knope’s desk in every Parks and Recreation episode), is that the most powerful and important influence women have had on our nation’s founding, growth, and success is this: They make men behave. All their other important contributions are secondary.

Collins provides examples from history. Here is one: The British investors of Jamestown—who sent only men to establish the work, so that they could not be distracted—were not seeing the expected return on their investment. They sent an agent to investigate, and it was found that the men weren’t working. According to the report of one Sir Thomas Dale, the men were at “their daily and usuall works, bowling in the streetes.” This habit kept the settlement, Collins explains, “a long, rowdy fraternity party, minus food.” The investors’ solution? They began enticing marriageable young women to set out for the colonies with offers of free passage and appealing hope chests. They supposed that wives might turn these “we’ll work tomorrow” fraternity boys into diligent, hard-working, productive men. And they did. One thing led to another, and presto: the most prosperous, hard-working nation in the history of the world. Not just because of women, but through the socializing power of wives and mothers.

Anthropologists have long recognized that the most fundamental social problem every community must solve is the unattached male. If his sexual, physical, and emotional energies are not governed and directed in a pro-social, domesticated manner, he will become the village’s most malignant cancer. Wives and children, in that order, are the only successful remedy ever found. Military service is a very distant second. Nobel Prize winning economist George Akerlof explains that “men settle down when they get married; if they fail to marry, they fail to settle down,” because “with marriage, men take on new identities that change their behavior.” This does not seem to work with same-sex male couples in long-term relationships.

Husbands and fathers become better, safer, more responsible and productive citizens, unrivaled by their peers in any other relational status. Husbands become better mates, treating their wives better by every important measure—physical and emotional safety, financial and material provision, personal respect, fidelity, general self-sacrifice, etc.—compared to boyfriends, whether dating or cohabiting. Husbands and fathers enjoy significantly lower health, life, and auto insurance premiums than do their single peers, for a strictly pragmatic reason. Insurance companies are not sentimental about husbands. Husbands get lower premiums because they are different creatures in terms of habits, values, behavior, and general health.

This is why Golding’s Lord of the Flies is a tale not so much about the dark nature of humanity as about the isolation of the masculine from the feminine. Had there been just a few confident girls amongst those boys, its conclusion might have been more Swiss Family Robinson.

Man and woman are not equal. He owes what he is to her. That is hardly her only power, but it is among her most formidable. Christianity has always known this. The Savior of the world chose to come to us through a wife and mother. It’s why you find what you find at the very center, the honored and singular position, on that superlative ceiling of a certain celebrated chapel.

Woman is the most powerful living force on the globe. She creates, shapes, and sustains human civilization. The first step in weakening her power is to convince her that she must overcome her femininity. This, ironically, is precisely what the most vocal strains of feminism have advocated. Yes, woman should have equality in the workplace, in politics, and in the public square. But to render her more like man in order to accomplish this, and to judge her womanliness a hindrance to her ascendancy, is to get things exactly backwards. It is to treat her as much less than she truly is.

By Glenn Stanton and published in First Things on August 16, 2016 (see here).

The EEOC announced last week that North Carolina-based Greenville Ready Mixed Concrete, Inc., has agreed to a $42,500 settlement in the EEOC’s suit (see prior posting) against it for firing a Seventh Day Adventist employee who refused a Saturday work assignment. The company has also agreed to a 5-year consent decree requiring it to create an anti-discrimination policy, engage in employee training, post notice about the lawsuit and submit periodic reports to the EEOC.

Every now and again I come across a fantastic article the warrants posting here; I recently came across one in Splice Today which, I thought, was pretty insightful. Be edified.

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These days, every piece of entertainment is read as though it were a raw allegory, in which there are no characters or events, only emblems. In a Christian allegory like Pilgrim’s Progress, abstract categories, collective identities, virtues and vices like Christian, Worldly Wiseman, and Obstinate run hither and thither, pretending to be particular people. The point isn’t art or a convincing fiction or shedding light on particular characters or events; it’s the flat didacticism of a hyper-simplistic sermon, pounded into the heads of the peasantry in the form of general categories of people performing generic actions. It was a relief to arrive at artists such as Shakespeare, in whose plays very particular people appeared and spoke and loved and fought.

If Shakespeare were around today, the reactions—even, for God’s sake, by drama critics—would tend to go like this: Danes are not really indecisive (let’s examine the statistics on that); this distortion and vilification of Danes must end. Women shouldn’t be portrayed as passive victims, like Gertrude and Ophelia, for women are super-strong, or at least if we keep saying that over and over we might convince ourselves that they are, which would be a good thing, even if they’re not. People like us want characters who look like us, in every single presentation of anything, so why doesn’t the cast more or less perfectly mirror the population as a whole by race, gender, orientation, disability?

Consider some of the reactions to the Roseanne revival, which really do tell you where we’re at right now. Roxane Gay in The New York Times, and a number of other people elsewhere, said it was funny, which, I remind us all, is a central function of comedy. Then she said she wouldn’t watch it again. She had a number of reasons, but the main one was that she doesn’t like the politics of Roseanne Barr’s Twitter feed. Soon we’ll be demanding an ideological profile of everyone working on any entertainment, so that we can insulate ourselves completely from any sign of disagreement. People, even fictional characters, disagreeing with me is abusive and harms my self-image; it’s like being sexually assaulted.

The new Roseanne has been held by many to be an “inaccurate” or “idealized” “portrait of the President’s base” (for example, by Jared Yates Sexton), which takes it for granted that the purpose of the show is to depict Trump voters, which I imagine is not exactly how Roseanne thinks about it, especially as her character long preceded the political advent of Trump. Now, there’s no doubt that what Sexton and others mean is that Roseanne, and every slice of media which depicts any person who supports Trump, should portray every Trump supporter as an idiot and a bigot. What they are saying flatly, though, is that Roseanne should base her character on statistical averages for Trump voters; that anyone who is depicting any Trump voter ought carefully to jam all Trump voters into a single body. Good luck.

That Roseanne Barr is a particular person, and Roseanne Conner a particular character, both of whom have a long history, is neither here nor there according to this style of criticism. That she’s extremely idiosyncratic and funny is irrelevant: if either Roseanne voted for Trump, she must represent herself as a “typical” Trump voter. There are about a million things wrong with this. It’s an extremely primitive form of raw philistinism that misunderstands art entirely. But perhaps the worst immediate practical consequence is that it’s turning television, drama, film, and fiction into sheer pedagogy. The question isn’t “Was that a good movie?” But, does it manipulate its audience to achieve some sort of social or political transformation?

That’s why Black Panther was welcomed as though it was the Poor People’s March on Washington, even as the cast peddled Lexuses. I’d like to start by demanding evidence that movies or sitcoms or novels actually do have much of an effect on anyone’s opinions or behavior or self-image.

If you were to put out a movie right now in which a black female character behaved passively, or in which she was in a self-esteem crisis that left her confused and which didn’t suddenly transcend into self-realization, you’d be regarded as a racist and sexist. People would criticize your work on the ground that it’s an inaccurate depiction of black women. You’d protest, in vain, that you did not write the character to be a representative of all black women, or “the typical black woman,” but rather a completely particular human being. In vain, that it’s be impossible to create a character that represented all black women. In vain, that every black women is in fact a particular human being. In vain, that what the critics want would make your art an idiotic allegory.

And in fact, what the critics demand is not an accurate representation of millions of people as one person, even supposing that such a thing were possible. What they demand is an inaccurate representation, a picture that is “aspirational,” in which each black woman depicted is all black women and all black women are beautiful and strong and overcome whatever hardships and barriers they face. Then maybe when all the black girls see it, they will become more like that.

So in the end, every character has to be an inaccurate and tendentious and impossible representation of millions of people, whether it’s all black women jammed into a single strong and beautiful body or all Trump supporters jammed into the body of Roseanne. You certainly will kill entertainment this way, making it all into an ideological falsification of reality. And if you think that proceeding in this utterly disingenuous and incoherent manner way will make black girls stronger or Trump supporters more ashamed, I demand that you show me the fucking evidence.

By Crispin Sartwell and published in Splice Today and can be found here.

On Tuesday, Mike Rowe, host of “Returning The Favor” and “Dirty Jobs,” took to Facebook to defend fathers and fatherhood in general, pointing to the growing discontent with having a strong dad in the home.

In the post, Rowe highlights a comment by Angelina Jolie he suggests echoes the sentiment of too many people in our culture:

A couple years ago, when Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt were getting divorced, Jolie was quoted as saying, “It never even crossed my mind that my son would need a father.”

I was struck by her comment, and I remember wondering how many other Americans might share her view. At the time, I didn’t think many. But today, I’m convinced the number is significant. I’m also amazed at how quickly fatherhood has fallen out of favor. Can you imagine a celebrity – or anyone for that matter – saying such a thing just twenty years ago?

Rowe then cites facts and statistics about the negative effects of a fatherless home.

The facts seem pretty clear.

63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes – 5 times the average. (US Dept. Of Health/Census)

90% of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes – 32 times the average.

85% of all children who show behavior disorders come from fatherless homes – 20 times the average. (Center for Disease Control)

71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes – 9 times the average. (National Principals Association Report)

43% of US children live without their father [US Department of Census]

Is it really so surprising to learn that a majority of bullies also come from fatherless homes? As do a majority of school shooters? As do a majority of older male shooters?

Rowe goes on to ask readers to “consider the possibility that this thing we like to call ‘an epidemic of bullying,’ is really an ‘epidemic of fatherlessness.’ I also think it’s reasonable to conclude that our society is sending a message to men of all ages that is decidedly mixed”:

Think about it. On the one hand, we’re telling them to “man-up” whenever the going gets tough. On the other, we’re condemning a climate of “toxic masculinity” at every turn. If that strikes you as confusing, imagine being a fourteen-year old boy with no father figure to help you make sense of it.

A couple years ago, when Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt were getting divorced, Jolie was quoted as saying, “It never even crossed my mind that my son would need a father.”

I was struck by her comment, and I remember wondering how many other Americans might share her view. At the time, I didn’t think many. But today, I’m convinced the number is significant. I’m also amazed at how quickly fatherhood has fallen out of favor. Can you imagine a celebrity – or anyone for that matter – saying such a thing just twenty years ago?

This week’s episode of RTF is about a guy named Carlos who found an effective way to deprogram bullies. Please watch it. It’s a great story about a great guy making a real difference around a serious issue. It occurred to me though, half way through filming, that bullying – like so many other social ills in today’s headlines – isn’t really a problem at all; it’s a symptom. In my view, a symptom of a society that seems to value fatherhood less and less.

The facts seem pretty clear.

• 63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes – 5 times the average. (US Dept. Of Health/Census)
• 90% of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes – 32 times the average.
• 85% of all children who show behavior disorders come from fatherless homes – 20 times the average. (Center for Disease Control)
• 80% of rapists with anger problems come from fatherless homes – 14 times the average. (Justice & Behavior, Vol 14, p. 403-26)
• 71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes – 9 times the average. (National Principals Association Report)
• 43% of US children live without their father [US Department of Census]

Is it really so surprising to learn that a majority of bullies also come from fatherless homes? As do a majority of school shooters? As do a majority of older male shooters?

I know this is controversial, and I’m sorry to inject an uncomfortable element into a post about a “feel-good” show, but I think it’s important to consider the possibility that this thing we like to call “an epidemic of bullying,” is really an “epidemic of fatherlessness.” I also think it’s reasonable to conclude that our society is sending a message to men of all ages that is decidedly mixed.

Think about it. On the one hand, we’re telling them to “man-up” whenever the going gets tough. On the other, we’re condemning a climate of “toxic masculinity” at every turn. If that strikes you as confusing, imagine being a fourteen-year old boy with no father figure to help you make sense of it.

Anyway, the bullying crisis is real, but the root cause has nothing to do with video games, or guns, or social media, or rock and roll, or sugary drinks, or any of the other boogymen currently in fashion. Nor is it a function of some new chromosome unique to the current crop of kids coming of age. Kids are the same now as they were a hundred years ago – petulant, brave, arrogant, earnest, frightened, and cocksure. It’s the parents who have changed. It’s the parents who have put their own happiness above the best interests of their kids. It’s the parents who actually believe “the village” will raise their kids, when the village is profoundly incapable of doing anything of the sort.

Of course, I could be wrong. I often am. But I can tell you with certainty that whatever the root causes of bullying may be, Carlos Flores is part of the solution. Watch the video and see for yourself. And if you’d like to see more men like him, doing similar things in other places, do me a favor and share his story. It’s a good one. And imitation is also part of the solution…

Every now and again I come across a fantastic article the warrants posting here; I recently came across one in Splice Today which, I thought, was pretty insightful. Be edified.

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Today, when we try to explain political results or describe the political landscape, we often do it in terms of which demographic groups—genders, races, orientations, classes, regions—voted for whom. And as political consultants and politicians try to win elections, they start the same way; they try to figure out how to dominate among white suburban women, for example. I’ve argued that politics relying on exploiting demographics—a style and a strategy more and more relentlessly prosecuted by both parties—is a contradictory nonsense, as well as a terribly unfortunate attempt to make the divisions between Americans ever more extreme. Here, I’m going to elaborate on articles I wrote for The Wall Street Journal.

First, it’s all rather evil. The basic approach of the Clinton campaign, according to its own strategists and surrogates—white guys such as Robby Mook and Joel Benenson—was to focus on relentlessly on turning out “women and minorities.” As demographics shift, they’ve long held, Democrats will dominate this growing segment of the population, and hence elections. (There is one problem here; the category “women and minorities” makes no sense.)

This has been a strategy for the last several cycles, in particular since the emergence of the “gender gap” in the 1990s; it was relentless in 2016. And I think it’s fair to say that Republicans have implicitly focused on white people and men as their basic constituency for decades, at least since Nixon played “the Southern card.” In Trump/Bannon nationalism, with its throwback style of sexuality and racial signaling, this appeal has become explicit.

In 2016, both sides leaned heavily on demographic analyses in deciding where the candidate should appear, for example, or in figuring out how to assemble an Electoral College majority. Particularly for the Democrats, however, this style of analysis is breathtakingly incoherent. The electoral coalition they imagine—of women, minorities, urban dwellers, gay and trans people—is conceptually impossible. The simplest way to see this is that the population cannot be split into two groups, women/minorities and men/white people.

A majority of American women are white, while half the members of racial minority groups are men. A coalition in which one party represents women and minorities and the other represents men and white people splits each of the white women and each of the minority men right between the hemispheres of their brains. Mook and Benenson were calling on people’s race to vote against their gender, and vice versa. If people can’t undergo fission into their demographic memberships—if, for example, a black, straight, middle-class man can’t be pulled apart into four different voters—this is all nonsense.

As a matter of fact, Trump won white women, leading to an outraged feminist condemnation of their reactionary sisters. Didn’t they know they were women first and white people second? Trump also did surprisingly well among minority men. These splits could continue to grow as the parties try to maximize them, and neither party would win an enduring advantage.

If I want to vote the way the parties want me to vote, and I am, for example, a rural straight Latino female, how would I proceed? The parties not only want to slice up the population and turn bits of it against the other bits, but to slice up each of us and, I suppose, turn us against ourselves, or force this poor sap to figure out whether she’s more straight than female, or more rural than Latino.

This does, in part, explain the interminable deadlock of our politics. Even as Democrats wait for demographic shifts to carry them to power, the growing minority population is half-male, the growing out-gay population is mostly white, and so on. Almost any way they try to maximize the demographic advantages they believe will serve them will also maximize the advantages of their opponents. We’re likely to be stuck here for a long time.

The parties got into this hell through polling, which has dominated every campaign. You can poll women, and you can poll white people. These two polls deliver different numbers; they appear to focus on different demographic segments. But the populations overlap at a rate of 50 percent, and your appeal is liable to alienate the other 50. These data heads seem clever, but they’re making howling mistakes.

If there’s a stage further into or beyond demographic politics, it may be signaled by Cambridge-Analytica-style “psychometrics.” The Democrats were still operating in 2016 at the primitive and incoherent level of large demographic segments, but the data analysis and targeting tools that are coming online now promise to target voters, or consumers, “down to the level of the individual.” If that were indeed possible, it might to some extent overcome the sort of conceptual problems I’m identifying. The Trump’s campaign’s micro-targeting, as opposed to the Dems’ primitive approach to the electorate in terms of large-scale groups demographic segments, might in part explain how Trump beat Clinton.

Micro-targeting might also lead to more sophisticated manipulations, more divisive appeals to group identities, smaller echo chambers. And yet if they come into my social media feeds appealing to my eccentric politics or consumption behavior as well as my demographic memberships—if they really atomize their appeals down to the level of individuals—the lines between groups might liquify a little.

I’m a white, heterosexual, rural male. And yet, if I were forced to choose sides among the demographic parties, I’d choose to go with the women and minorities (or I would, if the category were coherent). I don’t mean to make parties representing male whites and female people of color precisely morally equivalent, and the historical oppression exercised by people like me would make me go in the opposite direction; I don’t want to be in the racist, sexist party (though I also don’t want to be in the statist party). But, standing outside the process, it’s hard not to notice the cumulative effects of both parties together trying to maximize the gender and racial gaps. It’s tearing the country apart, at the scale of whole regions and groups, but also in villages, offices and families.

We might say that demographic politics imply a theory of human identity in which each of us is a stack or collage of memberships in social groups, in which each of us is a race/gender/nationality/orientation/class. Our behavior, and in particular our consumption and political behavior, is supposed to follow out of this stack, and hence to be manipulated through these memberships, which call out loyalties and real interests, but which are also in conflict, between the groups or within the self.

I wonder whether that exhausts the way you understand your self, whether that’s all you are or all you might aspire to be.

By Crispin Sartwell published on March 26, 2018 in Splice Today and can be seen here.

I have been writing in opposition to traffic cameras for a few years now (you can find all of my articles and posts on traffic cameras here). They are consistently controversial and violative of basic rights as described in the article below.

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A small Ohio town that lived by the red light camera could soon die by it, after a federal court ruled the speed trap has to pay back more than $3 million in automated speeding tickets.

The case of New Miami, population 2,321, highlights the controversy behind the tickets, which make stoplight-running motorists see red, but help keep the budgets of cities and towns in the black. New Miami will almost certainly go bankrupt if the Supreme Court doesn’t reverse a lower court’s ruling and spare it from refunding tens of thousands of tickets at $180 apiece plus interest.

“The village enacted this unconstitutional scheme primarily as a money making venture,” Josh Engel, the lawyer representing the plaintiffs in the New Miami case, told Fox News. “They increased their spending significantly after the scheme was put in place and it was basically used to fill holes in their budget that would traditionally have come from raising taxes.”

The case of New Miami is seen by many drivers across the country – including numerous lawmakers and lawyers – as the epitome of municipalities abusing their power by setting up speed traps and red light cameras in an attempt, not to make roadways safer, but to line their coffers.

“As with most issues there are elements of truth on both sides,” Bill Seitz, a Republican state representative from Ohio, told Fox News. “But many of these jurisdictions are using these tickets as revenue enhancements that ticket people for only minor infractions.”

Seitz is currently working to push a bill through the Ohio statehouse that would require cities to file all traffic camera cases in municipal court and would reduce state funding to cities by the same amount cities collect in traffic camera revenue.

The Ohio representative, who himself was caught on camera rolling through a red light in Columbus, added that in 2006 and 2014 lawmakers approved restrictions on photo enforcement cameras and that limits or bands on the devices enjoy wide support in cities like Cincinnati and Cleveland.

The current animosity directed at the cameras marks a shift in public sentiment toward the cameras.

While it is tough to pinpoint the national pulse as most studies are conducted at a state and regional level, but it appears that there are a growing number of areas who are starting to question whether the speed camera programs are effective or even constitutional.

Seven states are currently considering legislation to prohibit red light and speed camera use amid concerns that they are ripe for abuse and IIHS study found that the number of red light cameras in the U.S. dropped to 467 in 2015 from its peak of 553 in 2012.

“It’s really a money making venture,” Israel Klein, a lawyer in New York City, told Fox News. “They’re raking in the dollars and it’s an extreme abuse of power.”

Klein earlier this year filed a class action lawsuit against the city that argues that speed camera tickets are invalid and violate New York state law as the city failed to file all of the required paperwork with the court before allowing a private contractor to drop the photo ticket in the mail. New York City’s 2018 budget expects to haul in $119 million in photo enforcement fines.

“City officials don’t care about the law as long as they’re making money,” Klein added.

Proponents of the cameras, however, argue that they significantly lower the number of accidents on the road as both speeding and going through red lights are two of the biggest causes of car crashes in the country, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.

The most recent study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that nearly 1,300 lives were saved through 2014 in 79 large U.S. cities that installed red light cameras and, in a study of one county in Maryland, radar cameras installed on local roads reduced fatal or incapacitating injuries by 39 percent.

“Red light running is one of the biggest factors in crashes,” Russ Rader, a spokesman for the IIHS, told Fox News. “But [these crashes] are sharply reduced when cities use red light cameras.”

But a slew of recent corruption cases across the country involving local government officials and companies selling the cameras is not helping the image of them as moneymakers for municipalities.

In Chicago, camera vendor Redflex won in 2003 a $120 million contract to install 384 cameras and collected more than $400 million in traffic fines. It was eventually revealed that Redflex bribed Chicago City hall manager John Bills with $2,000 for every camera installed as well as giving him vacations, a condominium in Arizona and Mercedes among other favors.

Bills was eventually sentenced to 10 years in federal prison in a corruption scandal that rocked the city, while two Redflex higher-ups were sent to jail and the company was forced to pay $20 million to the city to settle a lawsuit.

Redflex did not respond to Fox News’ request for comment.

In Ohio, New Miami will have to wait to see if the state’s Supreme Court decides to take a look at their plea – something it only does with roughly seven percent of cases filed annually. Engel, the plaintiff’s lawyer, says he believes that going to the state’s highest court is just another move by the village to delay making their payments.

“The village is well aware that the chances of the Supreme Court deciding to hear this issue is slim. So why are they pursuing this Hail Mary?” Engel told the Journal-News. “This is another stalling tactic to further delay having to pay back the money taken from motorists in an unconstitutional scheme.”

By Andrew O’Reilly and originally published on Fox News on March 14, 2018 and can be found here.

Every now and again I come across a fantastic article the warrants posting here; I recently came across one in First Things which, I thought, was pretty insightful. Be edified.

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During one of the more infamous moments in Plato’s Republic, Socrates suggests that the ideal city needs a founding myth—what he calls “a noble lie”—to ensure its success. The myth has two parts. The first relates that every person in the city comes from the same mother, and thus encourages belief in a common origin and kinship of all the citizens who live in the city. The second relates that every person belongs by birth to a particular class based upon his or her talents and abilities, indicated by a metal gilded upon each soul at birth: gold for the ruling class; silver for ministers, soldiers, and high-ranking servants; bronze and iron for the workers.

Socrates argues that both parts of the myth must be believed by all citizens for the city to succeed. The myth at once seeks to unite and to differentiate, to explain what is common and distinct, to foster civic patriotism amid significant difference. The first part encourages civic commitment, shared sacrifice, and belief in a common good. The second justifies the existence of inequality as a permanent feature of ­human society.

Socrates is reluctant even to speak the myth aloud, recognizing how repulsive it is likely to sound to his hearers. More, he admits that it will require great acts of persuasion—likely over generations—before it is accepted by denizens of the city, and even then, it is likely not to be persuasive to the ruling class. If anyone is likely to accept the myth, he suggests, it is the uneducated working class.

When I present the noble lie to students in my classes, it rankles—as Socrates predicted it would. They dislike the idea that the just polity must be based upon a deception. But what irritates them even more is the suggestion that the just city must be based upon inequality. As good liberal democratic citizens, they intensely dislike the suggestion that inequality might be perpetuated as a matter of birthright, and they identify with the injustice done to the underclass. Over twenty years teaching at Princeton, Georgetown, and Notre Dame, I can’t recall a single student who regards the myth as anything but troubling. Most find it repugnant.

When pressed on the question of why it will prove more difficult to persuade the ruling class of the truth of the noble lie, most students believe that the ruling class’s superior education and intelligence make them more resistant to propaganda, while the simple working people are likely to succumb to deception because they don’t adequately understand their own interests. My students implicitly side with Marx in believing that the less educated are likely to adopt “false consciousness.”

Plato intends us to understand the myth ­differently. Unlike Marx, he did not believe that the members of the lower class would be unlikely to know their own interests. The underclass is likely to accept the myth because they realize it works to their advantage. Its members are keenly aware of the fact of inequality. That part of the “lie” hardly seems false to them. What is novel, and what works to their advantage, is the idea that inequalities exist for the benefit of the underclass as well as the rulers. That is, members with noble metals in their souls are to undertake their work for the benefit of everyone, including those whose souls are marked by base metals. By contrast, members of the ruling class are likely to disbelieve the myth out of self-interest. They balk at the claim that every person, regardless of rank, belongs to the same family. They do not want the advantages that might solely benefit their class to be employed for the benefit of the whole.

Only if each group accepts each part of the “lie,” as Socrates explains, is a kind of social contract achieved. Elites and commoners both accept the part of the myth that does not appeal to them for the sake of the part that does. Elites are distinguished in a society that justifies inequality; commoners are best off in a society that compels service of elites for the whole. Instead of acting as warring parties, both sides work for the good of all.

Such a compact is difficult to achieve. Much of the rest of TheRepublic is taken up with the question of how the ruling class can be persuaded, or even compelled, to throw in their lot with the rest of the city, rather than simply dominating or neglecting the others. Given the brute fact of inequality, Plato sees the great challenge of politics to be the task of persuading the advantaged to see themselves as part of the whole.

Compare Socrates’s expected response of the ruling class to this “noble lie” to the typical reaction of students at elite universities. Today’s elite students tend to focus on the myth’s claims about perpetual and generational inequality as the most objectionable part of the myth. The claim of common kinship seems unproblematic and even uninteresting. What explains the apparent reversal of scandal and resistance among the ruling class in our age?

Elite college campuses are hotbeds of activism against inequality, especially as it touches on race, gender, disability, and sexual orientation. In recent years, students and faculty from UC Berkeley to Yale to Reed College have protested instances of perceived bias, but few incidents have been quite so remarkable as the protests that greeted the social scientist Charles Murray at Middlebury College on March 2, 2017. Before speaking a word, Murray was greeted with twenty minutes of unbroken denunciatory chants by hundreds of students in the audience. In order to hold the planned discussion, he and his host, professor Allison Stanger, had to leave the lecture hall for a private studio. Students followed them and beat on the walls and windows of the room. As they left that secure space, the crowd buffeted and grabbed at Murray and Stanger, leaving Stanger with a neck injury and a concussion.

Murray had been invited to discuss his book Coming Apart, a study of the growing inequality between rich and poor white Americans between 1960 and 2010. Murray’s book focuses on two phenom­ena. First, he points to the way Americans have been sorted into separate geographic enclaves according to wealth, class, and education. Second, he points to the way poor and uneducated Americans suffer unprecedentedly high rates of social pathology, including divorce, out-of-wedlock childbirth, crime, drug addiction, ­unemployment, bankruptcy, isolation, and anomie.

The students who prevented Murray from speaking mostly come from, and will settle in, what Murray calls the “HPY” (Harvard, Princeton, Yale) bubble, a place of remarkable ideological, economic, and social homogeneity. Admission and graduation from an institution like Middlebury is the passport into the HPY bubble. This is no mean feat. According to U.S. News and World Report, Middlebury College is tied for sixth with Pomona College, behind Williams, Amherst, Bowdoin, Swarthmore, and Wellesley, in the rankings for best liberal arts colleges in America. It is among the most selective schools in America, accepting only 17 percent of applicants in 2017. Students have an average SAT score of 1450 out of 1600, along with a 3.95 high school GPA. Its cost for tuition plus room and board tops $64,000.

One might have thought that students at such a school would be keenly interested in hearing a lecture by someone who would discuss the evidence, basis, and implications of economic and class divergences in America today. Indeed, one might suspect that if the students were upset about inequality, they would have been inspired by Murray to direct the onus of their discontent against Middlebury College itself as a perpetrator of class division or even against themselves as willing participants in that perpetuation. At the very least, one might have thought that they would be interested in listening to an analysis of the role educational institutions play in creating and maintaining inequality. Instead, they shouted down the man who was going to speak with them about the role they play in perpetuating inequality—in the name of equality itself.

Of course, it wasn’t the subject of Murray’s lecture that was being protested, but the fact that he had discussed statistical differences in IQ among different races in his 1994 book, The Bell Curve. The main point of that book, however, was concern that social sorting would exacerbate class differentiation in America—just the kind of sorting that elite schools like Middlebury help to advance. The violent protests against Murray had the convenient effect of preventing any exploration of the pervasive class divide in America today, and leaving the elite students and ­faculty of Middlebury self-satisfied in their demonstrative support for equality.

Like so many similar demonstrations against inequality at elite college campuses, the protest against Murray was an echo of resistance of the ruling class to the noble lie. The ruling class denies that they really are a self-perpetuating elite that has not only inherited certain advantages but also seeks to pass them on. To mask this fact, they describe themselves as the vanguard of equality, in effect denying the very fact of their elevated status and the deleterious consequences of their perpetuation of a class divide that has left their less fortunate countrymen in a dire and perilous condition. Indeed, one is tempted to conclude that their insistent defense of equality is a way of freeing themselves from any real duties to the lower classes that are increasingly out of geographical sight and mind. Because they repudiate inequality, they need not consciously consider themselves to be a ruling class. Denying that they are deeply self-interested in maintaining their elite position, they easily assume that they believe in common kinship—so long as their position is unthreatened. The part of the “noble lie” that once would have horrified the elites—the claim of common kinship—is irrelevant; instead, they resist the inegalitarian part of the myth that would then, as now, have seemed self-evident to the elites as well as the underclass. Today’s underclass is as likely to recognize its unequal position as Plato’s. It is elites that seem most prone to the condition of “false consciousness.”

The dominion of this new elite has been long anticipated, discussed most cogently by social critics such as Michael Young, C. Wright Mills, and Christopher Lasch. Among the ablest chroniclers of the new elite has been New York Times columnist David Brooks, who in April of 2001 published “The Organization Kid,” an essay describing the replacement of America’s WASP aristocracy by a “­meritocracy.” After spending several weeks with students on Princeton’s campus, Brooks concluded that there had been certain gains and decided losses resulting from this regime change. One loss he bemoaned was abandonment of “noblesse oblige,” or an encouragement of concern among the ruling class for those less fortunate as a consequence of the mere luck of birth and genealogy. Brooks contrasted this with the older WASP ideal based on civic, military, and Protestant values: “The Princeton of that day aimed to take privileged men from their prominent families and toughen them up, teach them a sense of social obligation, based on the code of the gentleman and noblesse oblige. In short, it aimed to instill in them a sense of chivalry.”

Noblesse oblige—“obligations of the nobility”—provided some measure of legitimacy to the older aristocratic order. It allowed the ruling class to claim that their actions weren’t merely self-serving, but instead supported the whole community, especially the poor and powerless. The image of the knight-errant coming to the rescue of the damsel in distress was a romantic and dramatic representation of a much broader ethic, that of the strong protecting and standing for the weak. The ancien régime—premised upon the rule of a hereditary aristocracy that ruled for the good of the whole polity—was overthrown because most people ceased to believe its conceit. Its flattering self-portrait of a paternalistic and caring overclass was increasingly viewed as a self-serving rationalization and a form of societal self-deception in the service of status maintenance. Barbara ­Tuchman described the crisis of legitimacy of the chivalric code in her book A Distant Mirror:

The ideal was a vision of order maintained by the warrior class and formulated in the image of the Round Table, nature’s perfect shape. King Arthur’s knights adventured for the right against dragons, enchanters, and wicked men, establishing order in a wild world. So their living counterparts were supposed, in theory, to serve as defenders of the Faith, upholders of justice, champions of the oppressed. In practice, they were themselves the oppressors, and by the 14th century the violence and lawlessness of men of the sword had become a major agency of disorder. When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down. Legend and story have always reflected this; in the Arthurian romances the Round Table is shattered from within.

We may be quick to agree that there was a gap between the stated ethic of noblesse oblige and the ­actual actions of the nobility of the ancien régime. But, much like those who took for granted the naturalness of political arrangements during the medieval ages, today’s elites seldom subject their meritocratic justifications of their status and position to the same skepticism.

While elites may suffer self-inflicted blindness to the nature of their position, the rest of society clearly sees what they are doing. The uprising among the working classes across the developed West arises from a perception of illegitimacy—of a gap between claims of the ruling class and reality as experienced by those who are ruled. It is no coincidence that these rebellions come from the socialist left and authoritarian right, two positions that now share opposition to state capitalism, a managerial ruling class, the financialization of the economy, and globalization. These populist rebellions are a challenge to the liberal order itself.

Our ruling class is more blinkered than that of the ancien régime. Unlike the aristocrats of old, they insist that there are only egalitarians at their exclusive institutions. They loudly proclaim their virtue and redouble their commitment to diversity and inclusion. They cast bigoted rednecks as the great impediment to perfect equality—not the elite institutions from which they benefit. The institutions responsible for winnowing the social and economic winners from the losers are largely immune from questioning, and busy themselves with extensive public displays of their unceasing commitment to equality. Meritocratic ideology disguises the ruling class’s own role in perpetuating inequality from itself, and even fosters a broader social ecology in which those who are not among the ruling class suffer an array of social and economic pathologies that are increasingly the defining feature of ­America’s underclass. Facing up to reality would require hard questions about the agenda underlying commitments to “diversity and inclusion.” Our ­stated commitment to “critical thinking” demands no less, but such questions are likely to be put down—at times violently—on contemporary campuses.

Campaigns for equality that focus on the inclusion of identity groups rather than examinations of the class divide permit an extraordinary lack of curiosity about complicity in a system that secures elite status across generations. Concern for diversity and inclusion on the basis of “ascriptive” features—race, gender, disability, or sexual orientation—allows the ruling class to overlook class while focusing on unchosen forms of identity. Diversity and inclusion fit neatly into the meritocratic structure, leaving the structure of the new aristocratic order firmly in place.

This helps explain the strange and often hysterical insistence upon equality emanating from our nation’s most elite and exclusive institutions. The most absurd recent instance was Harvard University’s official effort to eliminate social clubs due to their role in “enacting forms of privilege and exclusion at odds with our deepest values,” in the words of its president. Harvard’s opposition to exclusion sits comfortably with its admissions rate of 5 percent (2,056 out of 40,000 applicants in 2017). The denial of privilege and exclusion seems to increase in proportion to an institution’s exclusivity.

Highly touted commitments to equity, inclusion, and diversity do not only cloak institutional elitism. They also imply that anyone who is not included deserves his lower status. If elites largely regard their social status, wealth, and position as the result of their own efforts and work (and certainly not of birth or inheritance), then those who remain in the lower classes have, by the same logic, chosen to remain in such a condition. This scornful view is shared by prominent voices on the right and left. For instance, James Stimson—the Raymond Dawson Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina—recently told the New York Times:

When we observe the behavior of those who live in distressed areas, we are not observing the effect of economic decline on the working class, we are observing a highly selected group of people who faced economic adversity and choose to stay at home and accept it when others sought and found opportunity elsewhere. . . . Those who are fearful, conservative, in the social sense, and lack ambition stay and accept decline.

In other words, it’s their own fault. They deserve to lose, just as Harvard’s meritocrats deserve to win.

That the ruling class today is more prone to denounce inequality from its manicured campuses than promote among its own denizens belief in a common civic life is not a sign of its greater enlightenment and progress, but a sign of a new aristocracy that is unconscious of its own position and its concomitant responsibilities. They are deluded by an updated “noble” lie.

From the vantage of nearly 2,500 years, Plato’s noble lie doesn’t appear to be a falsehood after all. For a society to function, two seemingly contradictory beliefs must be simultaneously held: We are radically different and radically alike. We are extensively differentiated yet bound together. We are called to sometimes radically unequal tasks, but those tasks are part of an effort to benefit the whole. Plato thought the “fact of difference” would be easy for people to acknowledge, since it is so evident to our senses, if not always easy for those in a position of lower status to accept. The challenge was how to achieve belief in a common origin and shared kinship. TheRepublic of Plato was one effort to answer that challenge, if a fairly absurd and implausible one (as Socrates readily admitted). We have two main answers on the table today.

For as long as our nation has been in existence, confused and diverging streams have fed into the American creed. The first of these was political liberalism. It puts a stress upon individual rights and liberty, promising that if we commit to a common project of building a liberal society, our distinct and often irreconcilable differences will be protected. Liberalism affirms political unity as a means to ­securing our private differences.

Christianity has been the other stream. It approaches the question from the opposite perspective, understanding our differences to serve a deeper unity. This is the resounding message of St. Paul in chapters 12–13 of 1 Corinthians. There, Paul calls upon the squabbling Christians of Corinth to understand that their gifts are not for the glory of any particular person or class of people, but for the body as a whole. John Winthrop echoed this teaching in his seldom-read, oft-misquoted sermon aboard the Arbella, “A Model of Christian Charity.” Winthrop begins his speech with the observation that people have in all times and places been born or placed into low and high stations; the poor are always with us, as Christ observed. But this differentiation was not permitted and ordained for the purpose of the degradation of the former and glory of the latter, but for the greater glory of God, that all might know that they have need of each other and a responsibility to share particular gifts for the sake of the common. Differences of talent and circumstance exist to promote a deeper unity.

So long as liberalism was not fully itself—so long as liberalism was corrected and even governed by Christianity—a working social contract was possible. For Christianity, difference is ordered toward unity. For liberalism, unity is valued insofar as it promotes difference. The American experiment blended and confused these two understandings, but just enough to make it a going concern. The balance was always imperfect, leaving out too many, always ­unstably oscillating between quasi-theological evocation of unity and deracinated individualism. But it seemed viable for nearly 250 years. The recent steep decline of religious faith and Christian moral norms is regarded by many as marking the triumph of liberalism, and so, in a sense, it is. Today our unity is understood almost entirely in the light of our differences. We come together—to celebrate diversity. And today, the celebration of diversity ends up serving as a mask for power and inequality.

In this settlement, the language of rights prevails. But as Simone Weil noted decades ago, the language of rights ultimately cannot build, or even sustain, a common life:

If you say to someone who has ears to hear: ‘What you are doing to me is not just’, you touch and awaken at its source the spirit of attention and love. But it is not the same with words like ‘I have the right . . .’ or ‘you have no right to . . .’ They invoke a latent war and awaken the spirit of contention. To place the notion of rights at the centre of social conflicts is to inhibit any possible impulse of charity of both sides.

Weil predicted what we now experience. After more than two centuries, we can no longer assert the compatibility of Christianity and liberalism. Liberalism is ascendant, but its victory will be pyrrhic. A ­society solely premised upon a shared belief in individual differentiation will end in a war of all against all. The state of nature lies not in an imagined past; it is plainly visible in a near and all too real future.

The new aristocrats believe we have transcended the need for Christianity, which they regard as a myth no less mendacious than Plato’s noble lie. They believe that by dispelling the old myths, they can become the vanguard of an ever more equal society. They blind themselves to the fact that this claim is a form of status maintenance, allowing denial of a deeper commonality with those they regard as benighted and backward. Elites denounce the “populists” while denying that they have fomented a class war. They deplore the obnoxiousness of Donald Trump, perfectly obtuse of their complicity in his ascent.

We are in uncharted territory. Liberalism coexisted with Christianity for its entire history, with Christianity moderating the harder edges of the regnant political philosophy, supporting forms and practices that demanded from elites the recognition of their elevated status, and hence, corresponding responsibilities and duties to those less fortunate. The thoroughgoing disdain and dismissiveness of today’s elites toward the working class is a reflection of our newfound “enlightenment,” just as is the belief among the lower class that only a strong and equally disdainful leader can constrain the elites. Liberalism has achieved its goal of emptying the public square of the old gods, leaving it a harsh space of contestation among unequals who no longer see any commonality. Whether that square can be filled again with newly rendered stories of old telling us of a common origin and destination, or whether it must simply be dominated by whoever proves the strongest, is the test of our age.

By Patrick J. Deneen and published in First Things in April 2018 (see here).

Every now and again I come across a fantastic article the warrants posting here; I recently came across one in Equip which, I thought, was pretty insightful. Be edified.

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SYNOPSIS

A central tenet of the new atheism is that Christianity and reason are antithetical, and that throughout history Christians have held back progress in science. Atheist historian Dr. Richard Carrier has promoted similar views in his contributions to essay collections such as The Christian Delusion and Christianity Is Not Great. He suggests that, but for the rise of Christianity, the ancient Greeks would have enjoyed a scientific revolution so that the “Dark Ages” never would have happened. However, the truth is very different. The science of the ancient Greek pagans was intended to reinforce their ethical and philosophical positions, rather than to be an objective study of nature. Admittedly, when Christians came to develop their own science in the Middle Ages, they were not being objective either. For them, science was the study of God’s creation. But the metaphysical assumptions of Christianity, unlike those of the Greeks or even Muslims, turned out to be extremely conducive to uncovering true knowledge about nature. They weren’t trying to, but it was Christians who laid the foundations for modern science.

It’s hard to imagine what life was like before the rise of modern science. For example, there were no computers, few effective medicines, and only the rich could afford colorful clothes because there were no artificial dyes. So central is science to our lives that the charge Christianity tried to hold back its advance is particularly damaging. It is particularly unfair as well. As historians have now realized, the evidence that the Christian faith actually had a positive influence on science is becoming ever stronger.

In this article, I’ll explain how it was medieval Christians rather than ancient Greeks who provided the philosophical framework in which modern science could arise. I’ll be paying special attention to the work of the atheist historian Richard Carrier, in particular the assertions he makes in two essays in anti-Christian collections edited by John Loftus.1Carrier is one of the few scholars working today who still supports the “conflict thesis,” so it is important to understand why he reaches conclusions contrary to the vast majority of historians of science.

The common perception of a historical conflict between science and Christianity remains strong. That hasn’t stopped almost all serious scholars from queuing up to condemn it. For example, historians David Lindberg and Ron Numbers have stated unequivocally that the popular view is wrong. But as Lindberg and Numbers ruefully admit, “Despite a developing consensus among scholars that science and Christianity have not been at war, the notion of conflict refused to die.”2 It is also becoming increasingly clear that much of the evidence cited to support the conflict thesis turns out to be bogus.3 For example, the church never tried to ban human dissection, the number zero, or lightning rods, as has frequently been alleged. Although Christians did once countenance the despicable practice of burning heretics, no one was ever executed for scientific beliefs. Even the notorious trial of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) turns out to have had almost as much to do with the papal ego as with astronomy. Finally, no one in the Middle Ages thought the earth was flat: Christopher Columbus most certainly did not need to prove it is a sphere.

THE PURPOSE OF ANCIENT GREEK SCIENCE

Richard Carrier is far too knowledgeable a historian to fall for these old canards. Neither does he make the mistake of saying Christians deliberately held back science. However, in his chapter in The Christian Delusion, entitled “Christianity Was Not Responsible for Modern Science,” he does make some striking claims. Much of this interesting chapter is taken up by a catalog of the achievements of ancient science. Carrier’s thesis is that a “scientific revolution” was imminent in the third century AD, but this was curtailed by an economic collapse of the Roman Empire. The Empire partially recovered and survived for another couple of centuries, but it quickly succumbed to Christianity. Because Christians were simply not interested in science, the chance of the ancient world matching the achievements of the seventeenth century was lost. Carrier accuses Christians of sins of omission because they neglected science. He doesn’t claim that they actively opposed it.4 Given that Christianity controlled all the seats of learning, it didn’t have to go to the trouble of attacking what it didn’t like. Just ignoring science ensured its stagnation.

Progress in Greek Science

I’ll come to the question of whether Christianity supported science in a moment. But first, it is worth examining exactly how far the achievements of ancient science extended. Is it true that a scientific revolution was just around the corner? To answer that, we need to examine the specific examples Carrier gives of progress in Greek science to see if they point toward a looming scientific revolution. He cites Hero of Alexandria (d. AD 70) as a major figure demonstrating that progress. But can we detect any real advances in science between the work of Aristotle (384–322 BC) and Hero, writing in the first century AD?

Carrier supports his theory with the example that one Strato of Lampsacus (335–269 BC) extended Aristotle’s “experimental method to machines and physics.”5 Strato was the second head of Aristotle’s Athenian school of philosophy in the mid-third century BC. Little of his work survives, but in antiquity he had such a reputation for science that he was known as The Naturalist. His major achievement that we know about today was to show that a true vacuum can be created artificially and that air can be compressed. That’s an impressive step forward from Aristotle, who said a vacuum is impossible. However, the relevant passage of Strato’s work has been incorporated into the introduction to Hero of Alexandria’s Pneumatics, written three hundred years later.6 Carrier claims that Hero experimentally refuted Aristotle’s claim that a vacuum is impossible.7 So why is Hero using a source that is three centuries old to prove it? This does not seem to be evidence of any progress in science at all.

Furthermore, in his Mechanics, Hero states unambiguously that heavy objects fall faster than light ones.8 Now, this is a fundamental error that is easily proven wrong by the simplest of experiments. Yet Hero did not do this. He simply accepted the authority of Aristotle on the question. Hero also wrote about the law of reflection, correctly noting that the angles of incidence and reflection in a mirror are the same. But this had been known since at least Aristotle’s day, so again Hero’s knowledge is not new or the product of new experiments.9 It would be fair to conclude that Hero was a practical mechanic and a tinker who pulled his theory from old books and never did anything approaching a true experiment in his life. As one eminent historian notes, “Hero is not very original. His significance lies in the way that he summarises existing knowledge in the form of a handbook.”10 This is very different from the assessment of Hero implied by Carrier.

Faltering Science

It looks like there was little scientific progress in the three hundred years between Hero and Aristotle’s pupil, Strato. Admittedly, in the field of mathematical astronomy, we do see the models used to describe the movements of the planets getting more accurate up until the work of Ptolemy of Alexandria (fl. c. AD 150). But the underlying physical theory didn’t really improve. The general impression is that science stagnates after the third century BC. There is a temptation to denigrate the ancient Greeks for making a good start and then letting it slip. But that would not be fair. The fact is, they were not trying to develop modern science. How could they when no one had any idea that such advances were even possible? Instead, the point of Greek science was to explain the natural world in terms that correlated with their ethical theories. Aristotle thought that the key to happiness was to know the ends for which we should live. His science is all about trying to find the purpose for which nature is designed. Plato (427–348 BC) wanted to raise our sights above mundane matters to unworldly perfection. For him, nature is a dim reflection of that perfection, and mathematics is a good way for the mind to contemplate higher reality. The other philosophical schools, such as the Epicureans and the Stoics, also had their own versions of science that were intended to provide a foundation for their ethical theories.11

So, the key to understanding Greek science is to realize that no one was seeking objectively to understand the natural world purely for its own sake. On the Nature of the Universe, the Epicurean poem of Lucretius (d. c. 55 BC), which lays out an atomic theory that was influential in the seventeenth century, is actually intended to teach morals and not science. Indeed, its science was already two hundred years out of date when it was written.12 That didn’t matter to Lucretius, whose purpose was not to describe accurately how nature worked but to show that the Epicurean philosophy was the best way to navigate life’s perils.

SCIENCE, EARLY CHRISTIANITY, AND ISLAM

Much ink has been spilled on the relationship between Christianity and pagan science. However, as we’ve seen, there were as many pagan sciences as there were pagan philosophies. And each of these philosophies developed a vision of science that reinforced the way they saw the world. The Christian attitude toward the natural world was very similar to that of their pagan contemporaries. Christian thinkers were acutely aware that ancient Greek science was not the objective study of nature but an adjunct to pagan ethics and religion. Unsurprisingly, this meant some of them treated it with suspicion. For example, Tertullian (AD 160–220) famously asked what Athens (representing pagan philosophy) had to do with Jerusalem (representing Christianity).13 Christians could not simply adopt one of the pagan natural philosophies since they were all intended to provide ballast for particular ethical systems. What was needed was a specifically Christian natural philosophy that understood nature as God’s creation and the backdrop against which the drama of salvation was played out. Christians did not neglect science but they did use it for their own purposes. Where pagan philosophy was helpful, Christians were happy to coopt it. A popular analogy, first proposed by Origen of Alexandria (AD 182–254), was that pagan learning was like the gold of the Egyptians that the Israelites took with them into the wilderness in the exodus.14

For church fathers such as Origen and St Augustine (354–430), God’s creative freedom always had to be respected. That meant reason alone was not enough to comprehend nature. This more skeptical attitude toward rational inquiry had some interesting results. For example, the Christian philosopher John Philoponus (490–570) carried out the simple experiment of dropping a heavy and light ball in the sixth century AD. He found they both fell at almost the same speed.15 This demonstrated that the Aristotelians were wrong and showed that, to truly understand the laws of nature, empirical investigation was essential. Nonetheless, we should avoid applauding Philoponus for anticipating some elements of modern science. He was a Christian thinker whose aim was to attack pagan philosophers, not a protoscientist.

In any case, by the sixth century, the antique world was collapsing rapidly. The Western Roman Empire had been overrun by barbarian invaders in the course of the fifth century. The fragmentation of the empire into petty kingdoms caused an economic decline that was exacerbated by the policies of the barbarians themselves. The civilian elite that had patronized philosophers was gradually replaced by a warrior aristocracy, which eventually gave rise to the systems of chivalry and feudalism. The Eastern Roman Empire survived longer. Unfortunately, a devastating war with Persia in the seventh century meant it was in no condition to resist the rise of Islam. Muslims took over swaths of the empire, including its breadbasket of Egypt and the sacred city of Jerusalem. Although the Byzantine Empire, ruled from the great city of Constantinople, hung on for another seven centuries, it was under an almost constant state of siege from then on.

Scientific Light of the Church in the Early Middle Ages

The period from the fifth to the tenth centuries used to be called the “Dark Ages.” Historians now reject that label as prejudicial, but there is little doubt that the years after the collapse of the Roman Empire were hard. The population shrank, and the economic surplus available for culture was reduced to a fraction of what it had been under Rome.16 Only the Christian church remained a haven for learning. It helped preserve literacy and knowledge of the classics through the early middle ages. Dr Carrier claims, in his chapter on the Dark Ages in Christianity Is Not Great, that the decline of science in this period was the fault of Christians.17 We’ve already seen how it is a category mistake to equate ancient natural philosophy with modern science. But even allowing that there was less interest in investigating the natural world in this period, the reasons are entirely down to external invasions and the change to a feudal society. In fact, as the example of John Philoponus shows, science in Alexandria continued to break new ground in the three centuries after Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire. The end came only with the annexation of the city by Muslim invaders in AD 641.

CHRISTIANITY AND THE RISE OF SCIENCE

We’ve seen how the schools of ancient Greek philosophers and early Christians developed their own versions of science to explain the world in a way that was consistent with their belief systems. The methodological mistake of Carrier is to measure ancient natural philosophies against the rules of modern science. But no one in the classical world was doing science objectively to study nature as an entity in its own right. They were all seeking to understand the natural background to their overarching philosophies. Admittedly, Carrier’s mistake is one shared by some partisans of Christianity’s place in the development of the modern world such as Rodney Stark and Thomas E. Woods.18 Christians have always used science as a way to understand the natural world’s part in a bigger picture, which, in Christianity’s case, includes the Trinity and salvation. Medieval theologians studied God’s creation without any inkling or wish to produce the comprehensive account of the material universe provided by modern science. Nonetheless, their activity uniquely led to the incredible successes enjoyed by physics, chemistry, and biology, not to mention medicine, over the last couple of centuries. To believing Christians, it is hardly surprising that theologically conditioned natural philosophy should be better at leading to true knowledge about nature than rival systems of thought. However, the historian must tread carefully to understand the factors that Christianity brought to the study of the material universe.

The Bible has relatively little to say about the natural world, but at least the book of Genesis makes it clear where the universe came from. It is not eternal but created by God at the beginning of time. In the fourth century, St. Augustine clarified the doctrine that the world was created ex nihilo, out of nothing.19 God did not use preexisting material whose properties He had to work with. Thus, as Genesis affirms, creation was “good” and as God wished it to be.

From the twelfth century, Christian theologians began to explore what this meant in practice. One consequence was that nature was separate from God and followed the laws He had ordained for it. William of Conches (1085–c. 1154), one of the most important of the twelfth century’s thinkers, explained, “I take nothing away from God. All things that are in the world were made by God, except evil. But He made other things through the operation of nature which is the instrument of divine operation.”20 Various Greek philosophies had accepted the rationality of the laws of nature, but for Christians, nature’s laws were God’s laws rather than the laws of logic. God was free to do as He pleased, so it was impossible to work out the laws of nature by using reason alone. To be sure, not everyone accepted this. A group of philosophers in thirteenth-century Paris, called the Averroists after a Muslim philosopher from Spain named Averroes (1126–1198), took the extreme view that everything, including God, was subject to logically necessary rules.21 This meant that rational philosophy alone was enough to comprehend all of existence, even the divine mind. Orthodox Christians rejected this doctrine and insisted that God was not subject to any limits, except perhaps the law of noncontradiction. The principle of God’s freedom and absolute power was the subject of a decree by the bishop of Paris in 1277. He stated that because God could do as He pleased, He could do things that philosophers said were impossible, like creating a vacuum or more than one universe.22 This opened up a world of possibility that Christian natural philosophers were quick to exploit.

In the fourteenth century, they began to consider many previously unthinkable ideas, such as whether the Earth was rotating. The Parisian scholar John Buridan (1295–1361) showed that the concept of relative motion means that we cannot tell if the Earth is moving. His arguments were used by Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543) to support his theory that the Earth is orbiting the sun.23 Buridan also built on concepts first suggested by John Philoponus in the sixth century to argue that the lack of friction in space means that the planets should continue to move forever after God has set them on their course. This anticipated the conservation of momentum.24 These theories formed the basis of Galileo’s work and reached perfection with the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy by Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) in 1687. Newton himself was explicit about the religious roots of his work, as were Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), Rene Descartes (1596–1650), and Robert Boyle (1627–1691), among many others.25 Over the following centuries, their new kind of science grew into modern physics, chemistry, and biology, something that could never have happened in the ancient Greek or Islamic worlds.

Of course, we need to remember that medieval Christians were not deliberately trying to make progress toward science as we know it today. They were simply studying God’s creation so that they could become better theologians and Christians. In that sense, their motives for doing science were no different from those of earlier eras. It was just that the metaphysical background to Christianity turned out to be uniquely conducive to successfully understanding the working of nature. In summary, atheist historians such as Richard Carrier are wrong to say Christians neglected science and that pagans were on the point of a scientific revolution. On the contrary, Christianity was a necessary, if not sufficient, cause of the flowering of modern science.

James Hannam, PhD (history of science, University of Cambridge), is the author of The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution (Regnery, 2011).

David Lindberg, “Science and Early Church,” in God and Nature, ed. Lindberg and Numbers, 25.

Origen (London: Routledge, 1998), 211 (Letter to Gregory 2).

Cohen and Drabkin, A Source Book in Greek Science, 208.

Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 139.

Carrier, “The Dark Ages,” 209.

See, e.g., Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003) and Thomas Woods, Jr., How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization(Washington, DC: Regnery, 2005).

Let’s face it. Almost every child has likely had some type of meltdown in public, causing great embarrassment to both the child’s parent and to other witnesses in the vicinity. But while such disrespectful behavior is embarrassing at age two, it’s downright horrifying the older a child gets.

Dr. Leonard Sax recently experienced one of these horrifying displays of disrespect in his medical practice. He describes the scenario in a recent edition of The Wall Street Journal:

“Kyle was absorbed in a videogame on his cellphone, so I asked his mom, ‘How long has Kyle had a stomach ache?’ Mom said, ‘I’m thinking it’s been about two days.’ Then Kyle replied, ‘Shut up, mom. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ And he gave a snorty laugh, without looking up from his videogame. Kyle is 10 years old.”

Unfortunately, such behavior is no longer an anomaly, as Dr. Sax goes on to explain:

“I have been a physician for 29 years. This sort of language and behavior from a 10-year-old was very rare in the 1980s and 1990s. It would have been unusual a decade ago. It is common today. America’s children are immersed in a culture of disrespect: for parents, teachers, and one another. They learn it from television, even on the Disney Channel, where parents are portrayed as clueless, out-of-touch or absent. They learn it from celebrities or the Internet. They learn it from social media. They teach it to one another. They wear T-shirts emblazoned with slogans like ‘I’m not shy. I just don’t like you.’”

But while disrespectful children have become the norm, Dr. Sax has found that respectful, obedient children still exist out there, largely because there are still a few parents who practice authoritative parenting. And according to Dr. Sax, it’s not too late for parents to change course and start instilling respect in their children. His recommendations for doing so are summarized in the following three points:

1. Put the family before the child.

“Prioritize the family. The family meal at home is more important than piling on after-school extracurricular activities. Instead of boosting self-esteem, teach humility.”

2. Remove distractions.

“[N]o screens when you are with your child. Put your cellphone away. No electronic devices at the dinner table. Teach the art of face-to-face conversation.”

3. Draw a line in the sand, and don’t look back.

“If you’re going to make a change, don’t be subtle. New Year’s Day is as good a time as any to sit down with your children and explain that there are going to be some changes in this household: changes in how we talk, in how we behave, in how we treat one another.”

Americans have tried the kinder, gentler, let-me-be-your-friend approach to parenting for the last several decades. If the behavior problems in schools and the heightened level of sensitivity on college campuses are any indication, this parenting approach hasn’t produced the positive outcomes we were hoping for. Is it time for today’s parents to reverse course and begin teaching their children to respect others first instead of their own little selves?

By Annie Holmquist and originally published on December 27, 2016 and can be found here.